Father-friendly legislation and paternal time across Western Europe

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s fathers across Western Europe were increasingly enabled to spend paternal time, following changes to national legislation regarding access to leave. We create a father-friendly policy index to construct a typology of governmental leave provisions specifically available to fathers by 1996–1997. We then analyze the time spent caring for children by fathers in Western Europe in 1996 and 2001, using the European Community Household Panel survey. We find that the time fathers spend caring for children, and gender inequalities in time caring for children, vary considerably by country. The policy index is correlated with both absolute and relative levels of fathers' time spent caring for children.

Acknowledgements

The ECHP is used with the permission of Eurostat, who bear no responsibility for the analysis or interpretations presented here. This project has benefited from the financial support of the ESRC. We are grateful to Janet C. Gornick for her useful comments, as well as for her useful comments, as well as for comments from three anonymous referees.

Notes

1. The 15 European Union member states as of 1996/97 and Norway.

2. Paternal leave is the generic term; specific terms (for example, paternity or parental leave) are also used in our paper in discussions of particular legislation.

3. The exclusion of non-state provisions from the index allows the comparative analysis of the baseline leave provision in Western Europe. Thus the total amount of leave available to fathers in Europe will be underestimated. This should not affect the results of the correlation analysis, unless the presence of such agreements is related to the presence (or absence) of statutory provisions. If there is a positive (negative) relationship, then our correlation analysis may overstate (understate) the effect of statutory provisions.

4. Except for Sweden and Norway as the data are not available.

5. In Norway after the introduction of the father quota, the take-up rates of men increased from 4 per cent in 1993 to close to 80 per cent in 1996 and this percentage seems to be rather stable (Ellingsaeter 1999: 52).

6. Micro-level factors that affect parental time include wage rates of both spouses, educational levels, occupation, the prices of market-provided care, the number of children in the home, and levels of non-labor income. See, for example, Presser (1989), Bryant and Zick (1996), Bianchi (2000), Hallberg and Klevmarken (2003), Hildebrand and Williams (2003) and Sandberg and Hofferth (2005) for discussions of these variables and trends.

7. The information used to construct the indices refers mostly to the legislation in place as of 1997. As previously noted, most countries with such legislation had it in place prior to that time. Some (such as the UK), did not enact legislation in response to the EU directive until much later. The information is collected for the then 15 member states of the EU, plus Norway.

8. The commentary that follows neglects certain aspects, chiefly differential provisions for single parents and parents of disabled children.

9. The EU parental leave directive was to take effect at a later date in Ireland, Luxembourg and the UK.

10. The choice of 60 per cent is an arbitrary one, somewhat in the mid-range of countries with paid leave. The highest values are found in the Nordic countries at about 80 per cent.

11. Certain groups are also sometimes excluded from leave. For example, small companies in Greece could object to the leave in the case that 8 per cent or more of the workers in the company took parental leave within a year.

12. Parental leave is additional to any paternity leave entitlement. Paternity leave is primarily designed to allow fathers time away from work in the immediate period following the birth of a child.

13. See Peracchi (2002) for a description of the ECHP data.

14. The “time spent caring” variable is not available for the UK, Germany, or Luxembourg after 1996.

15. Sweden is excluded from the analysis due to data limitations. Norway is not a member of the EU and so is not included in the ECHP.

16. For a fuller discussion of the substantial childcare time variable see Smith (2006).

17. Weights are not used, but estimates derived using a weighting procedure only vary by a few percentage points. Results available from the authors on request.

18. Thus, observations for the majority of fathers and the minority of mothers not spending substantial time are excluded.

19. We have not attempted to check the sensitivity of the results to changes in the assignment of these values.

20. The index values for Norway and Sweden have been excluded from Table 2, since these countries are excluded from the subsequent analyses. It should be noted, however, that Norway and Sweden have the highest values for all indices.

21. It is relatively rare to find family policy indices (as opposed to typologies) in the literature. Other family policy indices developed in the literature include a six-point index of gender equality in family leave policy design (Gornick and Meyers 2003: 138). Their index reflects only three features of policy design: paid paternity leave, non-transferable parental leave rights and wage-replacement provisions and has the slightly later baseline date of 2000. For those countries common to the two indices, the highest scoring countries in this index correlate with those in our index, but there is some disagreement with regard to the continental European countries primarily as a function of the introduction of paid paternity leave by 2000. Another set of indices developed by Gornick et al. (1997) regarding policies for mothers with preschool children correlates highly with our index, with the exception of the placing of France.

22. These results are available from the authors on request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison J. Smith

Alison Smith is a Lecturer in Social Policy within the School of Social and Political Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She is also a United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow. Her current projects include a cross-national focus on intergenerational contributions to childcare, the social stratification of parenthood, and the capacity for family life.

Donald R. Williams

Donald R. Williams is Professor of Economics at Kent State University, and Senior Research Associate with CEPS/INSTEAD, Luxembourg. He is a visiting scholar with the University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and teaches in the IMPALLA program in the sociology department at K.U. Leuven, Belgium. Recent publications include “Effects of Childcare Activities on the Duration of Self-employment in Europe”, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Fall 2004.